YMMV / Kevin Nash

• Awesome Ego: Nash is so brazenly egomaniacal that you kind of just have to marvel at him. Then again, he did pack 50,000 people in the Garden when he won the title, which gives him some license.
• Badass Decay: Diesel. Big Daddy Cool. That guy was cool. Seven feet tall and would cut amazing promos...when he was a heel. Face Diesel was godawful, Vince was trying to turn him into Next Hogan (which seems to be all Vince ever really tries to do when he actively manages wrestlers). Face Diesel was such a blatant carbon copy of Hulk Hogan that he even incorporated his own version of the "Hulking Up!"…well, the announcers claimed that he was "Revving the Engine.^note You know, because his name was "Diesel?"
• Base-Breaking Character: Kevin Nash is up there with Hulk Hogan, Jeff Jarrett and Triple H in terms of unpopularity with the internet fans e.g. smarks^note Triple H has managed to mostly escape this thanks to his work with NXT. It hasn't really changed people's opinions on his past wrestling career though. Nash slightly moreso since, during his tenure as head booker for WCW, he single-handedly prevented people such as Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit from getting their deserved pushes and robbed that place blind, helping to kill it from the inside. Of course, he's still wildly popular. Mainly because Nash is, at the very least, charming and entertaining.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • In the final years of WCW, Nash was earning a whopping $1.6 million per year (2/3 of what Hogan made) on a sinking ship that continued to hand out money it could no longer afford. If you think the average wrestling fan doesn't covet or admire (even secretly) that kind of swagger, you're mistaken.
  • The crazy testament to how over Nash and the Wolfpac were at the time is that the crowd went nuts for him beating Goldberg even with interference from a freaking tazer. Then he had the balls to book himself as a face, standing up for the "boys" against the "office" which kept them down.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Big Kev", "Big Lazy", "Big Poochie", and for his ability to become a main eventer, make huge sums of money, even controlling the booking of a company with very little talent and effort: "The Smartest Man in Wrestling".
  • "The Summer of Suck" for 1999 while he was booking WCW.
• Fans Prefer the New Him: In 2003 he famously lost a Hair vs Hair match against Chris Jericho, and had his hair messily cut off so he could have short hair in The Punisher (2004). Turns out Nash looked pretty good with short hair, and he had bleached it that week as well, so chopping it short already meant it looked better than that.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Oz actually got over in Japan. It likely helps that by the time he made an excursion to New Japan Pro-Wrestling for a pair of shows, the Oz gimmick had dropped all of the campy theatrics that he debuted with, and so Japanese audiences were introduced to a very standard caped wrestler that fit right at home in that promotion. In 1992, when he had already adopted the significantly better-received Vinnie Vegas character in the States, he even brought the Oz gimmick back for another NJPW excursion.
• Growing the Beard: His run as WWF Champion in 1995 is remembered for being... pretty poor. It's been noted he was the lowest paid WWF Champion because he was the lowest drawing. The highlight of which has to be Bret Hart taking it from him at the Survivor Series (well, that and his PWI Match of the Year with Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania XI, credit for which mostly lays on Michaels.^note Nash actually hates this match because Michaels spent the whole match trying to cut Nash's balls off, including a really ugly finish that led Nash to remark "I could have given myself a better looking powerbomb", and said if it was anyone but Michaels there probably would have been a fight in the locker room about it after it was over. It's generally acknowledged that it only won MOTY because it was replayed on broadcast TV a few months later, it got the most votes because it was the match that the most people watched, and both guys had better matches that year with other people (Nash with Bret, Michaels with Jeff Jarrett of all people, which is usually regarded as the best WWF match that year)) However, after that, he started becoming a more interesting heel. He then jumped ship to WCW and with the nWo became the Magnificent Bastard we know and love.
• Harsher in Hindsight: All the jokes about Nash's infamous quad tear become this with the realization that he's been dealing with a bad knee for his entire career.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: Big men are becoming passe in professional wrestling.^note Wrestling TV ratings and attendance have dropped at about the same rate as the average size of the wrestlers over the last 20 years. Coincidence? And yeah, people are in a Broken Base over Nash now. But back in the day, when he was actually booked well, he was an ice-cool who just came in and jackknifed your ass.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • As part of his Glass Cannon designation. He once tore a quad muscle just by walking across the ring to make a tag, giving rise to the (brief) "OW MY FUCKING QUAD~!" Now it's Nash *insert action*… *tears quad*.
  • He also has a summer house on Fire Island, thank you for asking.
  • Look at the adjective!: *insert a non-adjective*.
  • Nash had a cameo in John Wick as the hulking bodyguard Francis, who immediately agrees to take the night off when the title character has him at gunpoint. Many jokes were made about Nash finally putting someone else over.
  • "I booked myself to be pleased with this."
  • One courtesy of the Drunken Peasants podcast: "MID-90's KEVIN NAAAAASSSSSHHH!"
  • His abiliy to remember exactly what airlines he flew with, exactly what hotel he stayed at and exactly which restaurants he ate in (and who he ate with) while touring even decades after the fact in far more detail and sometimes with much more enthusiasm than he tends to recall most of his matches.
  • “What a pittance!” ^note In a home-video-exclusive promo from Summerslam '94, Diesel, having just lost the Intercontinental Championship, angrily dismissed his Tag-Team Championship belt as this, tossing it aside to the floor. Both his unique choice of words and his flagrant disregard for one of WWF's highest titles made this clip infamous, especially after its rediscovery by OSW Review.
  • The "Summer of 1992." ^note A meme that originated from 4chan, involving a poster of him admitting that he was sexually assaulted in the Summer of 1992. Nash himself acknowledged this on his "Kliq THIS" podcast.
• Memetic Loser: Once again, for the quad tear. Many memes have been made of it.
• Mis-blamed:
  • Booked himself to squash Goldberg and lose to a fingerpoke! ...Except he only got the book after he beat Goldberg and lost to a fingerpoke. Such is the hazard of booking by committee. He elaborated on this on Legends of Wrestling. The idea was to kill the win streak and make Goldberg look vulnerable. Goldberg was then supposed to spend the better part of the next year chasing down the nWo member-by-member until he finally got a rematch with Hogan at Starrcade '99. However, Goldberg injured himself by punching a limo window instead of using a baseball bat to break it like he was supposed to and he missed the next nine months. So bulding a powerful heel machine for Goldberg to bounce back against became pointless, because he had to have surgery and missed the next year.
    • This is actually incorrect, and constantly gets repeated because Nash himself always gets it wrong too: the Fingerpoke was a week after Starrcade 1998, the limo incident happened the night after Starrcade 1999, when Vince Russo was booking. What scuttled the plans was Goldberg taking time off to film a movie and Nash and Hogan not wanting to job.
  • His WWF Championship reign was a flop largely because they took this cool bad guy and neutered him into a smiling do-gooder babyface. Even Nash questioned the logic behind it in hindsight.
  • The infamous nWo Four Horsemen parody skit. Not that it wasn't his fault, no, it was mostly Nash and Waltman's idea. But Nash claims that the Horsemen actually didn't mind it and even thought it had some high points. That is until Arn Anderson's wife called and didn't like the unflattering way it had portrayed him as an alcoholic. Years later on his podcast Ric Flair said that his only problem with it was how it portrayed Arn. In rebuttal to Anderson, Nash often points out that they got the cooler for the skit from Arn's car. Read into that what you will.
• Never Live It Down:
  • Play (adj.)
  • Ending Goldberg's winning streak; then eight days later there was the Fingerpoke of Doom.^note As mentioned above, there's quite a debate if Nash was the one that actually booked this (not helping is that he has a habit of contradicting himself in different interviews), he once said in one of the shoots where he claimed not to have booked it "So I need every trick in the book including an actual stun gun to beat Goldberg, and then a week later I just hand over the belt to Hogan and now I'm under him [in the nWo] again? Why would I do that? I came out of that whole thing looking like the biggest douchebag of all!" Man's got a point...
  • His quad tear on Raw. This after he'd already suffered a bicep tear that left him on the shelf for months.
  • And his coining of the term "vanilla midgets" on stars such as Chris Jericho, Rey Mysterio Jr., Chris Benoit, and Eddie Guerrero — all of whom ended up becoming wildly popular world champions. Big Kev was unrepentant, stating that Benoit and Guerrero sharing a ring at WrestleMania is what killed pro wrestling for him.
• Protection from Editors: Nash, even more so than Hogan, refused to put any wrestler over (except as a joke). He used his "no cut" contract and position as "head booker" to squash and bury every WCW wrestler he could find, made a mockery out of the whole company (Television Championship in the trash can), and laughed all the way to the bank. Just looking at the numbers, it's hard to argue that he wasn't a key reason for WCW's failure.
  DDT: Hey, guess what's for sale on eBay? The dartboard that Kevin Nash uses to do the booking.
• Vindicated by History: While Nash used to be very disliked by the hardcore fandom for his "lazy" ringwork, backstage politicking, and Money, Dear Boy approach to wrestling, Nash tends to be viewed by them a lot more favorably nowadays. With so many wrestlers from his time having broken down bodies, being addicted to various drugs to deal with the pain they put themselves through, and dying prematurely, as well as the later revelations from Nash about how fucked up his legs actually were, today's fans are a lot more respectful of Nash understanding his limits unlike so many other wrestlers and not pushing himself in the ring when he could still entertain most fans without doing so. Then with fans better understanding today just how underpaid wrestlers are relative to the revenue they generate^note In the "Big 4" American sports leagues players get somewhere around 50% of all revenue, in WWE it's 15% at best. Of course all those Big 4 athletes are unionized (and 3 of the 4 leagues have fully guaranteed contracts), while professional wrestling has never had any kind of union and how much of a sham modern WWE contracts are (e.g. WWE can just cut contracted wrestlers at any time and only have to give them 90 days worth of pay instead of paying out the rest of the contract), most fans no longer gripe about Nash leveraging to get big guaranteed contracts, and even see it positively as Nash's efforts got all his fellow wrestlers paid more of their worth during the Monday Night Wars. It also helps that Nash is still a genuinely charismatic and funny guy who is very much self-aware, and that there has been no serious scandals involving Nash^note Aside from an incident in late 2014 where he'd gotten into a physical altercation with his son Tristen. However, when news came out that Tristen attacked his mother (Nash's wife) and Nash only fought back to defend his wife, the incident did no damage to Nash's reputation., making him seem like a pretty good guy whose worst crime was being a bad booker.
• The Woobie: Both his good friend, Scott Hall, and his son Tristen died in 2022. Tristen's death hit Nash especially hard; family, friends, and fans became worried about Nash's emotional health after several social media posts in the following weeks showed that Nash was having a hard time coming to grips with it all.

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